1. The clouds seal off the sky, a grim undulating wall of gray that thwarts her attempts to chart their course. By the fifth day she can only answer ‘at sea’ when the prince asks where they are.

2. Superstition holds that cats walk closest to the spirit world, but even here, where the barriers are thinnest, superstition is all that they can claim. Mice, on the other hand…

3. It’s easier not to try– and the days turn to weeks turn to months and it isn’t until some well-meaning coworker murmurs condolences that he realizes a year has passed.

4. They’d tried creating magical companion animals once, as a way of expanding their mana pools. Melding human and animal into a coherent whole… Their students’ students still whisper tales of the disastrous results centuries later.

5. The downside to waking from cryogenic slumber into a futuristic world is that no one knows how anything works. Kate glared unhappily at her current handler who was honestly confused as to why her charge kept asking such strange questions. If a hovercar worked, why did it matter how?

1. “Did you meant it?”
“Mean what?”
“When you said ‘only if you were the last man on earth’?”
“That was before I knew you had a time machine.”

2. Dreams are meant to be broken, nightmares doubly so.

3. If anyone had looked, they would have noticed the small yellow-green mouse that sat on the corner of the booth muttering to itself. But in all fairness the sudden appearance of the pink and orange triceratops was slightly distracting.

4. “Some questions are best left unasked.” The dragon’s glare was as far from subtle as a three story carnivore could get, and Jen decided she didn’t really need to know why it was chained to the wall.

5. “If you could have anything, what would you want?” She leaned back against the side of the front-loader, looking out across the development.

“Nothing.”

“Wait, what?”

“I don’t ‘want’ Tabby, it’s not possible, thus regardless of the situation my answer would remain ‘nothing.’”

“You don’t really have a grasp on the ‘theoretical questions’ portion of conversation, do you.” She patted the side of the loader affectionately.

“I would point out that you’re the one having theoretical conversations with a piece of construction equipment.”

These story prompts are released into the wild per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, so sayth their author Martha McMahon Bechtel.

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